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Twitter Search Now Includes Every Tweet Ever Tweeted

When Twitter first launched in 2006, there was no need to search through older tweets. Four years later (pictured above) the site still only offered the option to see what was happening “right now,” and it wasn’t until 2012 that Twitter let you search beyond the last week of status updates. The company has been quickly expanding what its little search bar can do, and today you can finally search through every single tweet on Twitter.

The new Twitter search, called the “complete tweet index” in an official blog post announcing the news, has been in development since 2011. “Our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published,” writes Twitter engineer Yi Zhuang, who developed the new search engine alongside co-workers Paul Burstein, Gilad Mishne.

Twitter search is still pretty simple, though the plan is to keep adding features until Twitter can understand more complex questions. We’d love to see Twitter move in the direction of Google’s predictive search or Facebook’s graph search, giving users even more control over how they comb through old tweets. Until then, it’s nice to know that we can finally revisit all our random thoughts from the past eight years on Twitter.

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Jacob Kleinman has been working as a journalist online and in print since he arrived at Wesleyan University in 2007. After graduating, he took a...Jacob Kleinman has been working as a journalist online and in print since he arrived at Wesleyan University in 2007. After graduating, he took a...